Transformer, Melbourne

Transformer is quite possibly the restaurant meat-free Melbourne
has been waiting for. It's the Vegie Bar gone haute. A stunning
design courtesy of Breathe Architects
has turned the double-fronted warehouse into a gloriously mood-lit,
plant-strewn space wrapped around an interior courtyard. It's
date-night territory, far from the clang and yoga pants of Vegie Bar.

A compact wine list flirts with the organic without going
steady; cocktails are full of snips from the garden; and the menu
doesn't bludgeon diners over the head with mission statements.

Chef Luke Florence knows how to use tofu but he's sidestepped
any mock-meat products. Around half the menu is vegan - a spelt and
seed steamed bao wrapped around fried tofu with spicy mayo might
win a few converts - while his richly textured salads show that
vegetables are the new norm.

When Laki Papadopoulos and Mark Price opened the Vegie Bar on
Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, Bob Hawke was Prime Minister of
Australia and Home and Away had just gone to air. It's
taken them 27 years to open Transformer, the grown-up version of
their perennially humming vegetarian and vegan café, but it's not
like they've been idle.

In the interim the pair has opened Rice Queen, St Jude's Cellars, and Panama Dining Room. They're
sticklers for a certain square kilometre of Fitzroy real estate,
including this run-down former transformer factory behind the Vegie
Bar.

It could have been a raw-food restaurant, Papadopoulos admits.
"I really got into that for a while a few years ago. But I found it
impossible to sustain. The gloss wore off really fast." These days,
he prefers "flexitarian".

"Life's a bit too short to have hard-and-fast rules about what
we eat. It's a bit like the weather - we all change. The brief in
the end was just good food."

Transformer serves the sort of food Papadopoulos says he
searched for fruitlessly on an eating tour of California and New
York last year.

"A lot of vegetarian food has pretty poor standards. We actually
found the best vego options were at meat restaurants. Hopefully
here you won't notice there's no meat."